How To Have Scrum In Sustenance or Maintenance Projects – Agile In Support Work

Posted on October 1, 2011
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Scrum framework can be applied to maintenance or support kind of work too. There is a misconception that the Scrum framework doesn’t hold good for maintenance work. Actually, it may look a little challenging initially to tailor Scrum to fit sustenance. Here is a brief on what could be done.

Generally, Support/Maintenance work involves lot of churn. Changes happen almost daily. Team has to work on high priority customer issues and sprint plan will keep getting interferences (unpredictable user stories) and tasks may need to be added in the middle of a Sprint. Maintenance project may not have releases as in the case of development projects. How do we handle this?

  • Important thing to note here is to have a short Sprint. Generally 1 Week Sprint. This will make the Sprint Plan to focus on priority items that need to be worked, through out the week and to resolve issues. This will make customer happy.

  • Keep more buffer time while planning the sprint – You never know if an escalated issue might land in your bin that may override all other current issues. If you have about 20% buffer time, you may be comfortably handle priority items without much impacting the sprint plan. If not new issues come, we just continue with the work and if there is bandwidth left, we may pick up more issues from the issues-pool.

  • Scrum-ban technique is being adapted by many. It is a combination of Scrum and Kanban method. It mainly categorizes support tasks in to “Not started”, “In progress”, “Done” on a white board. Post its with task description will be used to categorize the current pool of tasks. For more do check this nice article.

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